Tech Won't Save Us - Jobs Suck, But Not Because of Automation w/ Aaron Benanav

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Aaron Benanav to discuss why jobs are getting worse because the economy’s slowing down, not because technology is speeding up, and why that requires a vision of post-scarcity centered around human relationships instead of technological change.Aaron Benanav is an economic historian and social theorist. He is a post-doctoral researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin and author of “Automation and the Future of Work.” Follow Aaron on Twitter as @abenanav.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network and follow it on Twitter as @harbingertweets.Also mentioned in this episode:Prop 22 passed in California, stopping gig workers from becoming employeesParis explains the limits of a basic income, how Aaron’s book helps us think about the future, and the problems with luxury communismAaron explains why automation isn’t wiping out jobsAaron’s science fiction reading list: “The Dispossessed,” “The Word for World is Forest,” and “Always Coming Home” by Ursula K. Le Guin; “Red Star” by Alexander Bogdanov; “Hard to be a God” and “Noon: 22nd Century” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky; “News from Nowhere” by William Morris; “Looking Backward” by Edward Bellamy; “The Conquest of Bread” by Peter Kropotkin; “Trouble on Triton” by Samuel R. Delaney; “Star Maker” by Olaf Stapledon; and “Utopia” by Thomas Moore.Support the show

If we're going to change the world, then we need to actually have an inspiring vision of what it is that we want to build. And we have to convince people that that is not just a fairy tale. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week I'm joined by Aaron Beninoff. Aaron is an economic historian and social theorist. He's a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin, and he's the author of a new book called Automation and the Future of Work, published by Verso Books. In recent years, there's been a lot of discussion about how automation is purportedly destroying jobs around the world, but especially in the West, and how that's leading to worse prospects and lower quality of life for nearly everyone. But Aaron digs into the economic

data and finds that's not actually what's occurring. There's another reason for why jobs are getting worse and good jobs are getting harder to find, and it's not simply because technology is advancing at some rapid pace. In fact, it's probably not advancing as rapidly as it used to, even though we have a ton of PR that's making us think that way. This is a really interesting conversation, but I think it also presents some much bigger issues that we need to be thinking about. At the time I record this, the results of the 2020 US election are still being counted, but we do know that in California, Proposition 22, which cements the classification of gig workers

as contractors instead of making them employees which have access to all the rights, the minimum wage protections, the benefits that would come with that has been accepted by voters. Gig companies poured $200 million into defeating labor laws that serve workers' interests instead of what's best for their profit and their power, and now they will be fighting to roll those laws out across the rest of the United States and possibly the world. I think this is important in the context of what Aaron and I talk about because Aaron discusses how as the global economy has slowed down, as these jobs have been getting worse, there's already a massive informal sector in the global south, but that has been less the case that has been formalized over the past century in the global north. But the gig economy is kind of

re-informalizing some of the labor. Obviously, it's still recorded, but it's taking away a lot of those protections that we would generally associate with jobs. And I think what Proposition 22 shows us is that companies like Uber, these massive tech companies with a ton of venture capital that can fund now ballot propositions to write laws that are in their interest, not just lobbying, you know, governments and politicians directly, sets a really worrying precedent for what is to come next and the next stage of this fight with these tech companies and in favor of workers' rights. So I think that's something to keep in mind, and I'm sure it's definitely something that we'll be returning to in future episodes. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network,

a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. You can find out more information in the show notes. If you like our conversation today, please share it with any friends, colleagues, or on social media so other people can find the podcast and hear that you like it. You can also leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. And if you appreciate the work that I put into making this podcast every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Enjoy the conversation. Aaron, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me.

Ah, it's great to speak with you. You have this fantastic new book, Automation and the Future of Work, that kind of looks into this question that we've kind of been dealing with for almost a half decade now in terms of like what automation is doing and what the future of work is going to look like as a result. And there is this idea that automation is progressing at this really rapid clip and is going to kind of get rid of all of our jobs and make us all destitute because we won't be able to earn an income. Before we get into your response to that, I was hoping you could kind of explain the argument that these automation theorists are putting forward and what kind of implications that has for how we think about the future and the future of work. So I think, you know, most people will be familiar already with just all these articles in newspapers and magazines that just say like, oh, especially during the COVID crisis,

it kind of resurged this idea that intelligent machines and robots are already in the process of replacing us. Look at the COVID crisis, how machines, they can't get fevers, they can't transmit COVID. And so there's going to be this accelerating process of technological takeover. That kind of ferment in the newspapers and kind of in popular discourse also spills over into a really well-developed and argued social theory that says that this is in fact really happening. That is to say that jobs are being automated out of existence. This tendency is going to accelerate into the future. And eventually most jobs are a very substantial part.

Maybe all jobs are going to be done by computers and robots and intelligent machines. And so given that, they say, all these jobs are going to disappear. We have to do something. We have to change society in some way to change the basic institutions that allow people to earn an income and survive. And in a way, something I find really interesting about these texts is they always have this kind of, they have a certain trope, like there's a genre here, there's kind of a literary flavor to it, which I think everyone will be quite aware of, where the authors say, look, this could be a nightmare because everyone needs to work. All these people need to work in order to survive. A world without work could be quite a dystopia. But they say, on the other hand,

a utopia is just around the corner. We could live in an amazing world. We're not having to work as this positive social transformation. And what they say is that what we need to get there is a UBI, a universal basic income, which is going to give people money without requiring them to work for it. And it's a really broad conversation. It stretches all the way from MIT professors and business school kind of people, all the way to Aaron Bastani and the idea of fully automated luxury communism that was quite popular with many people in between US presidential candidates like Andrew Yang, Andy Stern, who used to be the head of a major union in the United States. So it's a really broad discourse. And one of the things I find so interesting about it is precisely that you find right, left and center people advocating it.

Yeah, certainly. And you see that with the basic income itself, right? It's like there's multiple different versions of a basic income that could theoretically be implemented to kind of free us from this automation hell that might be created, right? And I think what you say there about it kind of being a genre of book is really interesting. Because what I noticed is that there are even like explanatory examples and things that are used throughout many of the books that are the same. Like there's this one about, I think it was like in ancient China, they're like putting the rice to kind of illustrate the exponential growth. And like after so many, it just gets so big. And like this guy who's kind of like tricked them about exponential growth, they just execute them because it's like, Oh my

God, that's too much rice. We're not giving you all this, right? I saw it through like multiple of these books and I was like, why does this keep repeating? Like what is going on here? But I think one of the interesting things about your book is that you outline how this isn't the first time that this has happened, right? That we've thought that automation is going to get rid of all this work. You're an economic historian. So I was hoping you could give us some examples of when this kind of similar view was put forward in the past. And does the modern version of that significantly differ from what we've seen in those past times? You can probably go back even further. But the first sort of, to my knowledge, wave of automation talk is right during the Industrial Revolution, a little bit after the

kind of classic 1780s Industrial Revolution, sometime in the 1820s to 1830s. You have figures like Andrew Urey and Charles Babbage. Also, this guy I think needs to be studied more. His name is John Adolphus Etzler, and he was apparently a student of Hegel, became an engineer, spent time in Philadelphia, went to South America. He had like a whole fascinating career. I don't think Marx knew about him, but he wrote a book called The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labor by the Use of Nature and Machines. And he not only predicts like full automation, like machines making machines, he also predicts like solar and wave power and a

number of other things. I think that initial crop of automation theorists have a big influence on Marx. I think Marx himself is not quite an automation theorist, but he references a lot of that work and uses their ideas about what kinds of technological transformations are coming. Then, you know, of course, later on in the 20th century, you see it a number of times during the 20s and 30s, again, during the 50s and again during the 80s. And in those more recent periods, you definitely have more people talking about things like basic income. So even as late as the late 80s, early 90s, people like Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book called The End of Work. That sounds a lot like the contemporary automation discourse. It's just, you know, about 30 years too soon. And there's a book by Stanley Aronowitz et al. There's a number of other authors he wrote it with called The Post

Work Manifesto that has a very similar kind of flavor to it. I found it really interesting to read all this stuff. And exactly like you say, when you catalog them, you just see these repeated ideas and yeah, even examples like repeated over and over again in literature. And it's amazing how when you read something from the 1950s, they can already imagine that there's going to be computers with cameras that substitute for eyes that are going to be able to work an assembly line just like a human being. And even before that, like a steam powered machine that's going to be able to do everything. And it's pretty clear in a more recent period, there's sort of waves of investment in automation and artificial intelligence when investors suddenly think it's going to be

possible. And then it turns out that the gap between current technologies and this dream of fully automating robots and so on, people realize that there's a lot further to go with it. But yeah, it is a very interesting history. And again and again, I think what you see is that waves of interest in automation give rise to these utopian social theories about what a world would look like without work. And to me, that's some of the most interesting stuff. In an earlier period, you might think of like Herbert Marcuse, another really fascinating figure, James Boggs, who was a Detroit auto worker and an associate of CLR James, who actually broke with James around this idea that we need to build a society that's less centered on work and find identities that aren't so work-based. So Boggs is a really fascinating

figure. And then Andre Gortz as well. Those are all kind of social theorists from an earlier era, really inspired by and responding to the automation claims of their time. You know, you've already mentioned it, but now that we're in this pandemic, there is kind of this new wave of people saying like, okay, this is the time when there's going to be a lot more robots kind of implemented to take away these jobs. Why do you think that is not actually going to happen in response to the pandemic? I should say that I wrote this book as an economic historian, you know, as you mentioned, not as a technologist, not as an engineer. So I'm not an expert on the technology itself. I think as much as anybody, I can read all the different things that come out in the press and, you know, in kind of technology journals. I think as much as anybody, I can read all the different things that come out

in the press and, you know, in kind of technology journals. And it gives me the sense that a lot of this technology is really unproven. They can't do what they say they're going to be able to do. And that's a really important part of the story. It's not the part that I'm an expert in. So, you know, I want to make that clear. My sense is that the technology isn't really there. However, on top of that, there's an economic factor, which I can definitely tell you about. And that's just the fact that the automation theorists tend to act as if during the 2010s, it was already the case that there was this wave of investment in robotics and technology that, you know, we saw this accelerating trend. And then, of course,

during the pandemic and post-pandemic era, it's just going to accelerate and take off. But if you look at the numbers, it's just obviously not true. So the 2010 saw the lowest rates of investment in basically buildings and equipment like machines and stuff. And that's set to fall even more. So what we're seeing is really a dramatic decline in rates of investment, non-investment picking up. Part of the explanation for that is something that I'm sure we'll have a chance to talk about, which is just the incredible degree of already existing overcapacity and overproduction globally in industry.

That's meant that there's less and less new investment in industry. But then the shorter term cause is just that we've lived through a series now of these big financial bubbles that have popped. And there's just a massive overhang of debt. And basically, companies are not investing and they will invest even less during the pandemic and post pandemic era because they just can't imagine that the demand is going to be there for their products. So if you massively invest in all this new equipment and reorganizing production, you better believe that just on the other side of this downturn, there's going to be this massive upturn, a huge amount of demand for what you're making. And no one believes that. No one thinks that. Even the World Bank, all these big institutions that are supposed to be the ones cheerleading capitalism into the future, really believe that we're in for a long period of stagnation on top of the stagnation that we've already seen recently.

Yeah, really looking forward to that future. So you've laid out what these automation theorists think is supposedly happening, and we've started to get into why that's probably not actually happening, right? So if automation is not the culprit for, say, the lack of good jobs that we're seeing right now, what is your diagnosis? What is actually happening to cause this erosion in job quality, and then by extension, the quality of life that many people are experiencing? You just really hit the nail on the head. The thing is that the automation theorists are right about something. They're very right about something, which is the fact that people are having a lot of trouble finding jobs,

right? They're having a lot of trouble finding work. And because of that, their bargaining position against their employers is less. Even if you have a job, you're very worried about losing your job. And in general, what we've seen is a kind of, I think, when you look at the data and you see things like jobless recoveries, you know, it takes a long time for unemployment to fall after it rises. Workers' wages are not growing in line with productivity. There's all of these kind of, you know, inequalities rising. And all of those things are signals or indicators that workers' autonomy is falling. Their ability to have a say over their working lives is less. And that, of course, as you said, is reducing their quality of life up and down the income brackets, right? I mean, this is affecting middle class people. It's affecting working class people. And of course, that benefits the people at the very top, right, who make a lot more because of the weakness of the position of workers. So the automation theorists are really right to focus on that, but their explanation of it is wrong. And it's a longer story. And I really recommend that people look at the book because the book

is full of pictures that try to, you know, kind of give some graphical illustration of the trends that I'm describing. But in a basic sense, you could say that my argument is that the automation theorists think that what's happening is that jobs are disappearing because technology is accelerating that kind of second half of the chessboard story that you were indicating. They think that the technology is speeding up faster and faster, and that's what's causing jobs to be destroyed faster than they can be created. But my argument is sort of the opposite of that. What's really happening is that the economy is slowing down more and more. So there's this tendential stagnation of the economy, and that's slowing down the pace of job creation. So even though, when you look at the numbers, you can see that fewer jobs are being destroyed today than used to be the case in the past. Actually, when the economy was growing very quickly, productivity was also growing a lot faster. And that meant that there was a lot more churn in the labor market. A lot of jobs were being destroyed and then jobs were being created to replace them. As the economy is slowed down,

the rate of job destruction through labor productivity is itself slowing down. And so the real story here is one of stagnation. And I think that that's something that people are really in some way aware of, that when you look around you, I mean, in the technology catalogs, you see all these cool things about new technologies and ping pong playing robots. When you look around your life in the cities or countryside, wherever you live, you can just see that the reality is that, you know, there aren't cranes everywhere and beautiful new factories being put up. It's really just like a lot of stuff is like sinking, you know, sinking lower. And that feeling, I think, very obviously describes the reality that we live in. Now, in the book, you know, I provide a longer explanation where I focus in

specifically on industry. And I try to explain why during the 50s and 60s and early 70s, industry was growing at a really rapid pace. And that rapid industrial expansion was the driver of rapid growth throughout the economy. And I try to show that since the 1970s, really the mid-70s onward, we've seen a real slowdown in industrial growth. It's not that industry has shrunk, it's that it's growing at a slower and slower pace. And as that's happened, nothing has replaced industry as a growth engine. Actually, services suffer for something called Balmoss cost disease. They tend to have very low rates of productivity growth and nothing about the new technological revolutions that people are talking about.

Nothing's changed that. You still see very low rates of productivity growth in overall expansion and services. But so the book tries to explain why is it that industry, which used to be this gigantic growth engine, has really stopped functioning that way. And the argument is that the automation theorists, they sort of focus a little too much on the technological frontier, like what's happening at the bleeding edge of technological change. My argument is that what's really happened here is geographic spread of technological capacity. So we live in an era where there's just so many more countries that have tried to industrialize. There's so much industrial capacity in the world and this massive growth of industrial capacity, which makes a lot of sense why it's happened. Most countries in the world used to supply raw materials and agricultural products, and those products suffer from even worse overcapacity than industry. Prices have fallen even more severely. It's even harder to create jobs in those fields. And so as a result,

everywhere in the world, countries have tried to push into industry. They've gotten in, of course, into the lower rungs of these massive global supply chains. And they're competing for tiny slivers of this market. And in the face of all of this competition from below, the big multinational corporations kind of retreated to the apex of these supply chains, where they don't make very much anymore, but they take the largest part of the profits that result from all of this competition among suppliers. So I'm trying to go through a bunch of levels of explanation here, right? But the kind of key story here is that this overproduction, overcapacity in industry has killed the industrial growth engine. And because services suffer from this cost disease,

that they have very low rates of productivity growth, they haven't been able to replace industry as a growth engine. And as a result, the whole thing is slowed down. As it slows down, people think that technology is speeding up. It's kind of a relative frame problem. Like they think job destruction is speeding up, but it's actually everything slowing down. It only looks fast relative to how slow economic growth is today. I think that's great. And I think it does outline a lot of the really key pieces of the book and down. It only looks fast relative to how slow economic growth is today. I think that's great. And I think it does outline a lot of the really key pieces of the book and of the argument, right? To kind of illustrate why this automation is not at fault for what we're seeing with the problems in the job market, but it's these much larger kind of economic trends that are occurring. And now one thing I wanted to ask you about on that is

the international picture, which you started to talk about there, right? Because I think that's one of the real values of your book as well, is that you don't just look at the United States and Europe, you do take this broader lens to kind of look at what's happening around the world at China, but beyond that as well, right? Because what we did see is a lot of these countries around the world outside the global north industrializing, but then in many cases, they have also entered periods of deindustrialization, you explained. So I was hoping you could just expand on that a little bit more and give us a bit more of a picture of what's happening outside the global north and

what's happening in the global economy. That's such an important part of the story. I think a lot of people imagine that as the US, UK and other rich Western countries, high income countries were deindustrializing as they were losing jobs, that what was happening was that all these jobs were moving to the global south. And so people think, okay, deindustrialization here is associated with industrialization abroad. And I think people would then be surprised to learn that most poorer countries around the world, especially ones that have industrialized to some extent, have also been deindustrializing for a very long time.

So, for example, in the U.S., people often think about jobs moving to Mexico with NAFTA. And it's certainly true. Like, there are a lot of suppliers in Mexico for US, say, car manufacturers and so on. But actually, Mexico has also been deindustrializing for now over 30 years. Brazil has been deindustrializing, South Africa, Egypt, and so on. All of these countries have been deindustrializing, even China, which of course is a really interesting case. And people think a lot about the rapid industrialization of China in the 2000s. They actually often don't realize that China itself

had deindustrialized. In the 90s, there was a major destruction of jobs in China in the northeast, which is where the old kind of Maoist state-owned enterprises were that employed a lot of people. That area now is China's own Rust Belt, and there's been a lot of jobs lost there. And it was only in the early 2000s that the creation of all these new jobs in the Pearl River Delta southern region near Hong Kong actually expanded enough to overtake the job loss in the north. China has this re-industrialization boom between the late 90s and 2013. But then China itself has also been de-industrializing, and so has India from a much lower level. And as China, by the way, has been de-industrializing, its growth rate has slowed down and its demand for materials from all

these other poor countries has also slowed down. So although the kind of stagnation trend has come a little later to, I mean, obviously the growth trend came later to China as well, but then the stagnation trend has arrived there later. It too, China's also been kind of absorbed into this general systemic trend towards industrial overcapacity, falling rates of investment, and general slowdown in the economy. That's part of this global story of economic slowdown and stagnation. The book, again, also gives, as you said, more detail about that kind of global picture of what's happened. And it should be said that the story in the West or in the high-income countries

of low growth, meaning that it's become more difficult to find work, that people are more insecure in their jobs, that is just on a whole other level in the rest of the world where huge numbers of people have trouble finding work and where there's a gigantic informal sector that absorbs massive portions of the global workforce. It's almost like we're kind of seeing a sort of informalization through like the gig economy and this greater use of self-employment and all this sort of stuff, right? As we've kind of moved down this trajectory. And so I want to move into the response to that. And before we get to the one that you outline, I want to ask you about the knee-jerk reaction that some people might have, right? So you explain that in an environment of overcapacity and low growth rates, firms and countries, I guess, are kind of competing to get more of that

manufacturing share, because that's really what drives the growth or has in the past, right? And we see that the countries that use a lot of robots, Germany, Japan, South Korea, are able to retain a higher share of manufacturing employment than those who don't, which kind of already sort of disproves this automation discourse, right? Because more robots is actually associated with more jobs, not less. So one response to this, naturally, that? Because more robots is actually associated with more jobs, not less. So one response to this naturally that I think is becoming more common, you see it in the United States with Donald Trump and things like that is it would seem that throwing up new economic trade barriers and trying to reshore a lot of that manufacturing would then go some way to

increasing the growth rates and bringing back those good jobs. So why is that not the right response? Why is that an incorrect way to look at what we're seeing globally? That's, I think, a really interesting question. I think on the world scale, it's pretty obvious that most countries just couldn't achieve that, right? They're too integrated into the world market at this point to imagine throwing up barriers and trying to kind of develop behind those walls. I think the U.S. is so large that it probably could do something like that. Try to throw up tariff barriers, it would have a really massive depressing effect on the world. And I also think that one would find that it has limited impact even in the United States, that it's to say that there's just not that much growth to go around.

And even if the U.S. kind of took it for itself, it wouldn't be as effective as the kind of nationalist sort of fear mongers in our country, first people suggest it would. It's a much more structural problem than they believe. And what's really interesting on that note is that if you look at China, which has been suffering under trade barriers and in a way has been forced then to try to develop its own demand, they've used public investment. They've tried to keep the economy growing through massive, massive, massive amounts of infrastructural and development spending. And even there, they're running out of things to spend money on. And the economy is slowing down in spite of all the stimulus. So I think that there are real limits to that kind of project. But again, I think most countries couldn't even try to do it. The US

probably could try to do it, but it would have such a massive destabilizing effect on the world economy that I think they would be forced to turn around, reverse those policies very quickly. You know, as you say, the United States could probably pull it off, but then you would have a lot of countries around the world that wouldn't, and they would suffer even further as a result of that, right? Because of this massively inequitable world system or economic system that we have going. And so I want to get into the future that you lay out then, right? Because obviously, the post-scarcity society that is presented as being the result of mass automation is not happening unless things really significantly change. But you argue that even without all of these technologies, post-scarcity is still possible. There's a quote in your book that I really liked, so I want to read it. You write, abundance is not a technological threshold to be crossed. Instead, abundance is a social relationship based on the principle that the means of one's existence will never be at stake in any of one's relationships. So with that said, what does a post-scarcity society without mass

automation look like? And how is that superior to the way that we live today? I think that when you look at the history of, say, utopian thinking, but also the way utopian thinking has influenced emancipatory social projects like the workers' movement, socialists, communists, anarchists in the past, you'll see that many of them kind of imagined a world like the one that the automation theorists were suggesting, but without requiring automation. In fact, they thought it was possible in their own time, like even Marx, for example, thought that a much better world was possible in this way, as it were, in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s. So the question is, what was it that drove these earlier

post-scarcity thinkers? Why did they think that we could achieve that world on the basis of the technologies they already had, rather than kind of pushing it forward to some not yet arrived automating future? And the answer is that for them, the key was not to get rid of work entirely, but to reorganize the work that still remains to be done, to take it on as a kind of collective planning project, right? To take the work that needs to be done and share it it on as a kind of collective planning project, right? To take the work that needs to be done and share it out in such a way that everyone would participate in it and everyone would have a share in the free time and free life possibilities that result from

working together to supply ourselves and one another with everything that we need to live. Now, I think in a way, it's a program, as it were, that has these three parts. First, taking over the work that still has to be done and redistributing it. And that also includes not just redistributing the wage work that currently exists, but taking a lot of the tasks that in our world today are like unwaged household jobs, right? And taking those on collectively and also redistributing that work. The second thing is free giving of goods and services. So it's to live in a world where there's a whole range of basic goods and services that are just provided to people free

of charge that include everything that people need to live, food, housing, clothing, medical care, transportation, communication, and so on. All that stuff provided free of charge. And then the opening up beyond that of a realm of freedom where people can, as it were, kind of do as they please. Now, if you want to get into the more technical specification of how this would work, I've been reading a lot of different visions of it, science fiction and utopian ideas, and reading about the socialist calculation debate and all of these kind of big questions. How do you organize these things? How do you organize a planned economy without profit? Which are really fascinating. And, you

know, one can get into a lot of the technical details. But in this book, I'm just trying to get across the sense that instead of with the automation theorists kind of imagining that the problem of organizing work will just resolve itself with automation, that we don't have to worry about our obligations to one another anymore, because technology is just going to take care of that. You can kind of see how that's, I don't know what word to use. Maybe this is not the right word, but almost a kind of immature social thought or theory, right? Because it kind of imagines that we can just mop up all of the obligations and responsibilities we have toward

one another and just be free without those. When in reality, that's a big thing we have to solve, right? We have incredible technological capacities already. We could live in a world where everyone could pursue their dreams, where everyone would have the same chance to live the life that they want to live. But if we want to get to that world, we're going to have to change the way that we organize work to make that possible. And yeah, I think it's been really interesting to work on that and to read all of this science fiction, utopian thought and myself to be kind of really inspired by it all. One of the really important things that your book does is kind of illustrate and argue that we still need this kind of communal aspect, right? That we still need to

be concerned about the relationships that we have to one another and how that looks in a future society, whether there is a lot of technology or not, right? And that is one of the things that a lot of these kind of automation visions get rid of. Work is solved, we have everything we want, so we can just do whatever we want, right? It's still very individualist in that way, I think. And I think your book, drawing from a lot of these other visions, kind of presents us with the opposite. And now before I get into some of those visions that you've been reading, that science fiction aspect, obviously there is another group of people that say, actually, all that we need to do is give people a universal basic income so they'll have this amount of money so that they can afford to buy these things and not have to worry about working as much because job quality has decreased. So what would your response be to

these people who argue that all we need is to give people some money? I try to walk a line on that, where I try to say that the impulse there is obviously really a good one, right? The idea that people should be provided with enough income, regardless of who they are or what they do, universally, we should provide people with an income that gives them everything that they need to live is, I think, a really beautiful impulse. And it kind of takes the possibility of our society and it kind of boils it down to this one clear idea. We live in a very wealthy society.

We should just give people the money that they need to buy the stuff that they need, right? It's a great impulse that's behind that. I think sometimes people on the left can have a kind of holier-than-thou attitude where they sort of say like, oh, you discovered this thing you think is really cool. Actually, it's going to make life terrible for everybody, right? I don't like that. So even though I'm criticizing, I'm trying to do it from a perspective where I agree.

Like with the automation people too, I agree. I want to live in a world that's not centered on work. It's just the question is, how do we get there, right? So I think that the UBI story, if we were living in the world, the automation theorists describe, right? If we were living in a world where incredible technologies were just causing us to be more productive or the machines, as it were, to be more productive than human beings ever were, then it really would just be a problem of taking this incredible wealth that's being generated and giving people the means to access it for themselves, even as their jobs are disappearing. So, you know, in a kind of more technical language, you'd say that if

automation were really happening, the problem wouldn't be one of reorganizing production, it would just be a matter of changing the system of distribution. What I'm saying is that that's not why people are having so much trouble finding work. The reason why they're having so much trouble finding work is that the economy is growing more slowly and the kind of possibilities for rapid growth have disappeared in a world where technologies and productive capacity are just spread out more across the world. So in that world, giving people more means of payment, I mean, there's a bunch of problems that that would give rise to. But the obvious one is just that it would very quickly become a kind of zero-sum struggle. Like you'd really confront the foundational

problem of an economy where people who control investment, the very small number of people who make decisions about investment, you would small number of people who make decisions about investment, you would have to really eat into their profits and into their wealth in order to produce this very high level of basic income. And then they wouldn't invest in the means that people are getting, the money that lets them pay for stuff, its capacity to purchase things that aren't being made, it would be put in danger. So the impulse there is really right. But in a world of economic stagnation, UBI would face basically the same problems as the welfare state, a problem of funding it and a problem of kind of a real struggle over resources that already exists and have already led to a real decline, right, in the redistributive powers of

the welfare state. As the economy is slowing down, we see all these austerity measures that are kind of constricting the size and scope of the welfare state. And in a stagnant economy, the same kind of pressures would affect UBI. And what scares me about that is that if people get into UBI as a really transformative and emancipatory project, they will be very disappointed when it turns out that the kind of UBI our society can support looks much more like these horrible right-wing, even racist visions of UBI that are coming out of the right and are coming out of the neoliberal sector where they're saying, we can provide people with this money,

but to do it, we're going to liquidate the welfare state. We're not actually going to redistribute more. We're just going to redistribute as money rather than as other forms of assistance. And that, I think, is a very scary possibility. But if I'm right that we're not living in an automating world, but rather in an increasingly economically stagnant world, it's much more likely UBI will take the form that the neoliberals are arguing for, that the right is arguing for, than it will look like the kind of emancipatory left-wing vision. life. It's just that doing that is going to require that we reorganize production, that we change the way that we work, how we distribute work, and how we're responsible to one another. We're going to have to change production, not just distribution. So it's a bigger task in a way,

but it's also one that points toward a much greater degree of democracy, freedom, and control over our lives than the UBI one, you know, when you really look at it, what it offers. We should shoot for the stars. That's my view. I think that's a key point, right? Further democratizing production is really important, and it gives regular people a lot more power over their daily lives, over their communities, over the economy that governs so much of how we live, right? And one of the biggest issues that I've had with the basic income is the inability to kind of reckon with that question of power, right? Because as you describe, in the society that we live in today, if we were to really get this

basic income that is described, workers would need a lot more power. It would not simply be handed over by the capitalist class, right? And so without that power, the kind of basic income that would be delivered would not be one that would ultimately serve the interests of the working class. And if that power were developed, why would you just stop at a basic income, right? Now, I want to end by asking you about the future and how we perceive the future. And you talked there about reading a lot of kind of utopian and science fictional visions for the future, right? And so in the book, you kind of emphasize a lot of that and talk about some of those visions and how it's inspired how you think

about kind of the future that we should or want to move toward. And of course, it's also inspired a lot of the people who push the visions of automation as well. And we see it with the tech billionaires. They're also very inspired by different science fiction and things like that, that they've encountered over the years. And so all of these visions can help us to think of and see a different kind of a future, a different way of organizing society so that it works in a different way and in different people's interests. So why do you think it's important to have a vision for a future kind of society that we want? And how does that help us to bring others along and make them more easily conceive of what that future could look like? I think that for a very long time, the left has just been so embattled. And the possibility of a really emancipatory future

or project to really change the world has been so stripped down to its barest bones that instead of advocating for a positive future, what people have been doing is they've been engaging in kind of negative projects, a project of critique, right? Mostly sort of explaining why the world that we live in sucks. And it does suck in a lot of different ways. And a large part of my book is devoted to explaining why it's so bad and what generates these kind of negative feelings and dissatisfaction and frustration about our world. But if we're going to change the world, then we need to actually have an inspiring vision of what it is that we want to build. And we have to convince people that that is not just a fairy tale, that it's

possible to change the world. And we live, for better or worse, after a whole century of people trying to change the world and those projects failing, not only because they were attacked from the outside, but because of their own internal problems. I don't think anyone wants to live in a Stalinist dystopia. Fewer people believe, this is something we should spend more time on though, understanding the limits even of the kind of golden age of mid-20th century capitalism, all of the problems of that, and the inability of the people who advocated that to find a way forward in the 70s and 80s as the economy was slowing down. So, you know, you might say that

a kind of Stalinist bureaucratic centralization and Keynesian, quote unquote, social democratic welfare state, those projects have failed us and we need some new idea about what the world is going to look like. So I think that having a positive vision of the future, and not like a really complicated one that you need to study for 20 years to understand, but something where if someone's like says, well, you know, what would you do? How would you reorganize society? Like, we should all have our five sentence version that actually inspires us of what we think we could do. And writing this book was largely about me trying to answer that question for myself and try to explain it in a way that I

found inspiring. Like if someone asked me, you know, what would we do? It's like, well, we take over the infrastructures and workplaces of society. We would redistribute that work in a fair way so that people who are working too much get to work less and people who either don't work or whose work feels like it has no purpose, right, that they get to be involved in meaningful social work that people get something out of. And that this project of work redistribution allows us to create a world where no one goes hungry anymore, a world where people have access to all the goods and services that they need. And that gives them a kind of independence that allows them to both negotiate their position in life, both in their families, at home, and at work, and in society more broadly,

the kind of power that comes from independence and being important and having a social purpose. And that that also opens up onto a world of freedom where we actually get to benefit from all these technologies and incredible ways that we've enlivened our possibilities and can look at our lives, not as like, how are we going to survive? How are we going to make a living? But rather, like, you know, you only have so much time on the earth. What do you want to do with that time? And what kind of things do you want to see? And how do you want to contribute to the world? And what kind of experiences do you want to have for yourself? Like, we should be able to talk about that. And for me, reading science fiction and utopian literature is incredible, because it's just full of people

living and actually a lot of that stuff is written in very dark times. It's written in like very difficult, dark and dismal times, people still have this capacity to dream up better worlds, right? And imagine a future and then begin to take the steps to translate that into a positive program. And I would just add that I think that if you went back and looked at, you know, an era like the mid to late 19th century, which is when a lot of socialist organizing was just getting off the ground and people were struggling incredibly hard to make tiny differences in the world, you would find that those people were able to do that because they felt like they were part of a much larger and broader social project and a vision that inspired them of social change. And they felt like even if they, you know,

weren't necessarily going to get to see that world, that they were contributing to its realization. And I find that a lot of the people I know, like myself included, up until very recently, we've been so lost in this position of critique that we've given up on the positive vision and the inspiring account of the world that we can build. And maybe I think that partially it's because we clearly now live in an era of major social movements, right? Transformative social movements that are looking for some articulated vision of how to get beyond this world, how to fight not just against austerity, but for a really different kind of future. So we live in a world where these things are happening and we should get involved in them. And, you know, and maybe it's also just because I'm in middle age now. And so you get over, you know, you get over your kind

of punk aesthetics and your hatred of the world. And you're like, wow, I need to build something, you know. So the whole world actually demographically is, you know, starting to head towards middle age. So maybe it's not unrelated. But yeah, and I would recommend, I mean, what would you recommend? What have you been reading science fiction that you find inspiring? I'm not as well read on science fiction as I would like to be. But I would say that one that I always go back to is Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed. It's one of like, I think the most important utopian science fiction books that I've ever read. Before that, I had never really read a science fiction book that really laid out a different kind of society in the way that she does in that book. And, you know, the anarchist society that she describes is certainly not perfect.

But I think that it really just opens your mind to a whole different way of conceiving how society can be organized, how the economy can be organized. And even if we don't want to completely copy what's in that model, there are aspects of it that we can pull away and say, like, this would probably work a lot better than what we're doing right now, along with maybe these other things that we've pulled from other places, you know? Yeah, I love Ursula K. Lewin. She wrote three utopian novels, I think. One, the one you mentioned, and then the word for world is forest and always coming home. There's also Bogdanov's Red Star. The Strugatsky brothers have a book called Hard

to Be a God and also Noon, 22nd Century, which is a series of short stories. I think more people should read William Morris's News from Nowhere, which has converted so many people to socialism, as well as a book that was written against by Bellamy, Looking Backward. I think that's a really interesting book as well. Peter Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread, underrated, classic. Samuel Delaney has one called Trouble on Triton. That's really good. And another figure I've been reading a lot lately, very interesting, is Olaf Stapledon who sounds like he's from Scandinavia but he's just an English guy who had really weird parents but he wrote a book called Star Maker that is a huge transformative science fiction vision that's worth reading but

yeah there's so much stuff there I mean there's there's a huge amount of literature and I myself am just trying to make my way through I also recommend reading Thomas More's Ut huge amount of literature and I myself am just trying to make my way through. I also recommend reading Thomas More's Utopia, kind of an underrated classic as well. That's fantastic. And it gives the listeners so many things that they could look to to see how other people were thinking about what the future could look like at various different times. And the future that you outlined in your book that you outlined just a few minutes ago, I think is one that a lot of people could find really attractive and could see why that is kind of the way that we should be moving. Aaron, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk and for writing this fantastic book. Thanks so much.

Thank you for having me. It's great talking to you. Aaron Beninov is the author of Automation and the Future of Work, published by Verso Books. You can buy it directly from Verso or hopefully anywhere else that sells books, especially an independent bookstore. You can also find Aaron on Twitter at at A Beninov. And you can follow me, Paris Marks, at at Paris Marks.

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